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The Libertarian party nominated two respected former state governors for president and vice-president in 2016, and enjoyed its most successful election performance ever, winning nearly 4.5m votes.

To many, it seemed that the Libertarians were a genuinely relevant third party in US politics, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans and Democrats. But in 2020, the party, which advocates for small government and civil liberties, has gone in a wildly different direction.

The Libertarian vice-presidential candidate this November is an internet talkshow host who ran for office alongside a man wearing a boot on his head, and who has promised the electorate free ponies, zombie power and the killing of baby Hitler.

Spike Cohen, who narrowly won the nomination at the partys virtual convention in May, will team up with Jo Jorgensen, a university lecturer and lifelong Libertarian who has spent years as a loyal party advocate and who is said to have expressed a preference for a more traditional running mate.

The partys method of choosing candidates each is voted for independently by party delegates allowed for the seeming extreme mismatch.

The candidates have seemingly got on with the job, holding separate bus tours around the country, but their stated goals in office could hardly be more different.

Cohen originally ran for the Libertarian vice-president post alongside the presidential candidate Vermin Supreme, a longtime political activist best known for turning up at protests or presidential primaries while wearing a rubber boot on his head.

During the campaign Cohens promises to the electorate were unusual. His 14-point platform included a Waffle House on every corner, legalizing recreational plutonium and developing bullets that instead of harming you do helpful things like clearing up headaches and relieving nasal congestion.

Impeaching every member of the supreme court and replacing them with a janitor, his name is Reginald, and he will be our king, Cohen said in a YouTube broadcast in December.

Youre probably thinking: What do you need a king for if we have a president and vice-president? But the thing is were gonna be time-traveling a lot and you know were not gonna be here all the time.

You know, were gonna be out killing lots of babies that eventually become tyrants. We go back in time and make right what once went wrong. Were not gonna have time to be here doing a bunch of stuff.

After winning the nomination at a virtual convention in May, Cohen said his campaign with Supreme had been fun satire to bring people in, which contradicts what he told ABC15News in January.

The Jorgensen-Cohen campaign did not respond to requests for an interview.

Jorgensen, a Libertarian party member for more than two decades who was the partys vice-presidential nominee in 1996 and who reportedly said she would vote for Cohens rival John Monds for vice-president, ran a more traditional campaign.

If elected president, Jorgensen said at the South Carolina Libertarian party convention in November: I would turn America into one giant Switzerland, armed and neutral, but enough forces to protect and defend American soil.

The Jorgensen-Cohen ticket comes after the Libertarian party won 3.3% of the vote in 2016, the partys best ever performance.

Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, who was also the Libertarian candidate in 2012, was the presidential candidate in 2016. His running mate was William Weld, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts who this year challenged Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.

Despite the promising electoral performance, Weld, in particular, was criticized by some party members as being Republican lite, which could have prompted the change of strategy this year.

While Cohen may have distanced himself from his promises of ponies, time travel and kings, however, some of his and Jorgensens choices as Libertarian candidates could still serve as a turn-off to voters.

In July the Guardian reported that Jorgensen had appeared on a podcast associated with the anti-government boogaloo movement. One of the interviewers runs a Facebook page laden with memes that appear to invoke white nationalism.

This month, the party involved itself once again with the boogaloo movement, when Cohen spoke at a gun rights rally co-hosted by a self-described boogaloo boy in Richmond, Virginia. Cohen used his speech to argue relaxing gun laws could end police violence.

If you want to have your gun rights defended, if you want to have an end to police brutality because people have more guns, Cohen said at the rally.

In a country dominated by Republicans and Democrats, there is evidence that Americans want a third option.

A 2018 Gallup poll found 57% of Americans believe a third major political party is needed a belief that has more or less held steady for the past 10 years.

Whether Cohens promises of ponies and zombies and time travel fill that need remains to be seen.

Read this article:
The Libertarian party was up and coming in 2016. What happened? - The Guardian

The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire says it has cleared an important hurdle in its effort to have its candidates appear on the general election ballot Nov. 3.>> Download the FREE WMUR appWednesday was the deadline under state law for local supervisors of the checklists across the state to tell the LPNH and independent candidates if the nomination papers they submitted in early August were valid and were certified.LPNH vice chair and spokesperson Richard Manzo said Thursday afternoon that the various checklist supervisors certified 1,058 petitions in each congressional district. The fact that the number was the same in each congressional district was a coincidence, Manzo said.The number in each district surpasses a reduced threshold of 975 petitions in each district set by a federal judge in July. That number applies to statewide candidates for president, governor and U.S. Senate and for U.S. House candidates in each district. The requirements for down ballot candidates are fewer.The judge made the ruling reducing the requirement after hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by the LPNH against Gov. Chris Sununu asking for relaxed ballot requirements. The LPNH cited the difficulty it was having collecting, in person, the required number of nomination papers due to the Stay at Home and Safe at Home orders issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.Normally, Libertarian candidates would have been required to obtain 1,500 signed nomination papers in each of the states two congressional districts. But the judge cut that requirement by 35 percent.The next step is for Secretary of States Office to verify the findings of the supervisors no later than Wednesday, Sept. 2. Manzo said party officials and candidates will deliver the certified petitions to the Secretary of States Office at 9 a.m. that day.Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said his office will then do its own count of the petitions certified by the supervisors and verify that they meet the threshold. Once they hit the number, we will stop counting and their candidates will appear on the general election ballot, Scanlan said.Although the Libertarians may have met the threshold, it appears many of their nomination papers did not pass muster. Manzo told WMUR in early August that the party submitted 2,400 petitions in the 1st Congressional District and 1,600 in the 2nd District.Many nomination papers are routinely thrown out because the people filing them out are not actually registered voters in the town or ward they list as their address or their nomination papers are ruled illegible. But Manzo had said the party expected a 75 percent validity rate, far higher than the 44 percent rate apparently achieved in the 1st District and the 66 percent rate achieved in the 2nd District.Still, the bottom line, Manzo said, is that the party is pleased that it appears to have surpassed the necessary threshold.Thanks to the hard work of party volunteers, candidates, and their staff, the Libertarian candidates will appear on the ballot as Granite Staters have come to expect, Manzo said. Were grateful to the judge for his thoughtful and ultimately accurate ruling reducing our petitioning requirement, and to our attorney, Jon Meyer, who handled this uniquely challenging case with the skill and attention needed for a favorable ruling. Manzo said attending the Wednesday event to deliver the nomination papers to the Secretary of State will be eight Libertarian candidates: Justin ODonnell, U.S. Senate; Darryl W. Perry, governor; Zachary Dumont, U.S. House 1st Congressional District; Andrew J. Olding, U.S. House 2nd Congressional District; Manzo, Hillsborough County Treasurer; Nicolas Sarwark, Hillsborough County Attorney; Robert Daniel, state representative in Hillsborough County District 11; and Tobin Menard, state representative for Sullivan County District 9.If the statewide threshold is met, the Libertarian president candidate, Jo Jorgensen, will also appear on the ballot.

The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire says it has cleared an important hurdle in its effort to have its candidates appear on the general election ballot Nov. 3.

>> Download the FREE WMUR app

Wednesday was the deadline under state law for local supervisors of the checklists across the state to tell the LPNH and independent candidates if the nomination papers they submitted in early August were valid and were certified.

LPNH vice chair and spokesperson Richard Manzo said Thursday afternoon that the various checklist supervisors certified 1,058 petitions in each congressional district. The fact that the number was the same in each congressional district was a coincidence, Manzo said.

The number in each district surpasses a reduced threshold of 975 petitions in each district set by a federal judge in July. That number applies to statewide candidates for president, governor and U.S. Senate and for U.S. House candidates in each district. The requirements for down ballot candidates are fewer.

The judge made the ruling reducing the requirement after hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by the LPNH against Gov. Chris Sununu asking for relaxed ballot requirements. The LPNH cited the difficulty it was having collecting, in person, the required number of nomination papers due to the Stay at Home and Safe at Home orders issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Normally, Libertarian candidates would have been required to obtain 1,500 signed nomination papers in each of the states two congressional districts. But the judge cut that requirement by 35 percent.

The next step is for Secretary of States Office to verify the findings of the supervisors no later than Wednesday, Sept. 2. Manzo said party officials and candidates will deliver the certified petitions to the Secretary of States Office at 9 a.m. that day.

Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan said his office will then do its own count of the petitions certified by the supervisors and verify that they meet the threshold.

Once they hit the number, we will stop counting and their candidates will appear on the general election ballot, Scanlan said.

Although the Libertarians may have met the threshold, it appears many of their nomination papers did not pass muster. Manzo told WMUR in early August that the party submitted 2,400 petitions in the 1st Congressional District and 1,600 in the 2nd District.

Many nomination papers are routinely thrown out because the people filing them out are not actually registered voters in the town or ward they list as their address or their nomination papers are ruled illegible. But Manzo had said the party expected a 75 percent validity rate, far higher than the 44 percent rate apparently achieved in the 1st District and the 66 percent rate achieved in the 2nd District.

Still, the bottom line, Manzo said, is that the party is pleased that it appears to have surpassed the necessary threshold.

Thanks to the hard work of party volunteers, candidates, and their staff, the Libertarian candidates will appear on the ballot as Granite Staters have come to expect, Manzo said. Were grateful to the judge for his thoughtful and ultimately accurate ruling reducing our petitioning requirement, and to our attorney, Jon Meyer, who handled this uniquely challenging case with the skill and attention needed for a favorable ruling.

Manzo said attending the Wednesday event to deliver the nomination papers to the Secretary of State will be eight Libertarian candidates: Justin ODonnell, U.S. Senate; Darryl W. Perry, governor; Zachary Dumont, U.S. House 1st Congressional District; Andrew J. Olding, U.S. House 2nd Congressional District; Manzo, Hillsborough County Treasurer; Nicolas Sarwark, Hillsborough County Attorney; Robert Daniel, state representative in Hillsborough County District 11; and Tobin Menard, state representative for Sullivan County District 9.

If the statewide threshold is met, the Libertarian president candidate, Jo Jorgensen, will also appear on the ballot.

Read more:
Libertarian Party says it has enough certified petitions for its candidates to appear on Nov. ballot - WMUR Manchester

This may be a bigger political gamble than conservatives appreciate. Survey research strongly suggests that Americans still support open markets. In July 2019, the Pew Research Center found a solid 65 percent of Americans saying that free-trade agreements have been a good thing for the United States, up from 45 percent just before the 2016 election. So during President Trumps protectionist first term, support for international commerce has robustly increased.

Last September, Gallup found that 87 percent of Americans have a positive view of free enterprise and 70 percent think business can do things more efficiently than government can. These results hold regardless of party affiliation, but theyre stronger on the political right. Only 7 percent of Republicans said there was too little government regulation of business and industry, for example, compared with 46 percent of Democrats.

Could it be that the 2016 upset was attributable to something other than a wholesale rejection of limited-government principles among the Republican base?

To be clear, I am not predicting that the libertarian moment has finally arrived. One 2017 study suggested that people who want the government to stay out of your bedroom as well as your pocketbook (as the saying goes) make up an almost vanishingly small share of the voting population. But within the Republican coalition, there is a genuine constituency for economic freedom.

Proponents of big-government conservatism point to a crisis of stagnant wages, a labor-force exodus, too many unstable families and crumbling communities caused, they believe, by the unwillingness of American elites to protect working-class jobs from foreign competition. The dream of a family supported by a single breadwinner is increasingly out of reach, they say, especially for men without college degrees.

Yet some scholars have questioned the data underpinning this narrative. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, notes that the wages of nonsupervisory workers have increased by 33 percent, accounting for inflation, since 1990; when taxes and transfers as well as inflation are considered, incomes in the lowest quintile of households rose by 66 percent over the same period.

To the extent that the cost of living can seem to be spiraling out of control, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly driven by health care, higher education and housing three sectors that have long been heavily regulated and wildly subsidized. And thanks to global capitalism, even the least among us today have access to an ever-improving array of food, medicine, technology, entertainment and more.

Read the original here:
Republicans Are Ripping Out the Very Heart and Soul of Their Party - The New York Times

Today from the Down in Alabama podcast:

A lot of us really enjoy a drive-in movie.

As a matter of fact, a lawn chair in the back of my truck is my second-favorite place to watch a movie -- after the recliner in my living room.

But the vibe that the Sidewalk Film Festival has thrived on for 21 years in Downtown Birmingham will be hard to replicate at a drive-in theater.

The setting might be less On the Town and more American Graffiti, but theyre still serving up about 150 movies.

On todays show we also talk about a state senator whos recovering from COVID-19 and a veterans home that is dealing with an outbreak.

Plus, after a few years of doing Down in Alabama and being able to pick on Democrats and Republicans, we get a crack at Libertarians.

Between COVID guidelines, noise ordinances, left/right polarization and the continuing war on drugs, 2020 hasnt been an easy year for Libertarian Americans.

The podcast is short and free. Listen to it by clicking on the player above or subscribe by looking for Down in Alabama on the device of your choosing. Get this and other AL.com newsletters here.

Click here for the Spotify podcast page

Click here for the Alexa skill page on Amazon

Click here for the iTunes podcast page

Click here for the Stitcher podcast page

Read the rest here:
COVID, Libertarians, and drive-in movies - AL.com

The Washington Post reports that many conservatives are ditching their free market orthodoxy due in large part to Chinese industrial subsidies that allegedly threaten critical parts of the American industrial base:

Since the Reagan years, Republicans have taken the opposite view that government should stay small and out of the way and not engage in what has been derisively referred to as picking winners and losers. But Chinas rise is forcing them to rethink that.

Chinas central and regional governments are investing heavily in hightech fields such as aircraft and electriccar manufacturing, semiconductors and robotics, by some estimates providing hundreds of billions of dollars to domestic companies through subsidies and other support.

As evidence of this shift, the Post cites to recent federal legislation, passed overwhelmingly by both chambers of Congress and praised by Republican industrial policy advocates, that provides billions of dollars in new subsidies to U.S. semiconductor manufacturers. As Inoted afew weeks ago in alengthy and skeptical blog post on the bill, the primary basis for these subsidies according to its sponsors and other supporters (and confirmed by the Post) was the aforementioned China threat, in this case the billions of dollars that the Chinese government is spending to develop agloballycompetitive semiconductor sector. To its credit, the Post briefly notes my skepticism before quoting many others at length who are supportive of the semiconductor plan and broader U.S. industrial policy efforts (one of whom rejects naive libertarian views about government involvement in the economy).

However, the Post unfortunately omits much of my argumentagainst the new U.S. subsidies, most notably the numerous reports (including alengthy U.S. International Trade Commission analysis in 2019) that Chinas semiconductor sector, despite all of those subsidies, was hardly athreat to the thriving and in many respects globally dominant American semiconductor industry. Today from the South China Morning Post comes further evidence of that fact:

At an idle construction site in western Wuhan, Chinas steep climb to semiconductor independence is clear for all to see.

The partiallybuilt factory, owned by Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (HSMC), was meant to be akey part of aUS$20 billion investment that turned the province into achip manufacturing hub.

But two years after it was started, construction has ground to ahalt, with little evidence of progress beyond afew cranes, workers dormitories and steel frames jutting into the air.

The project, which the local Dongxihu district government said in July had stalled due to underfunding, is the latest example of aChinese chip factory hitting the rocks because of poor planning or funding shortfalls.

Earlier this year, aUS$100 million manufacturing plant set up by US chip giant GlobalFoundries and the Chengdu city government ceased operations after remaining idle for almost two years. In the countrys east, aUS$3 billion governmentbacked chip plant owned by Tacoma Nanjing Semiconductor Technology went bankrupt in July after failing to attract investors.

Be sure to read the whole thing, which details the HSMC projects many (sometimes humorous) problems and again indicatesthat Chinas grand semiconductor plans and massive subsidies are not nearly as threatening as U.S. politicians and industry lobbyists make them out to be.

The semiconductor episode also permits two broader lessons. First, it shows that the mere presence of foreign government subsidies is rarely, if ever, agood reason for American ones especially when theyre going to aprofitable U.S. industry with billions in domestic capital expenditures (and billions more cash on hand). Second, it provides another good example of why some libertarians remain skeptical of U.S. industrial policy plans. All too often even (or especially) in the case of national security and China (or Japan before it) ideas that sound good and necessary on paper are revealed upon closer inspection to be corporatist giveaways that counter imaginary threats and end up doing more harm than good. Maybe the U.S. government can overcome these obstacles in the future, but both the semiconductor subsidies and numerous other examples indicate that its not the skeptical libertarians who are being naive here.

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Conservative Industrial Policy and the "China Threat" - Cato Institute